England of My Heart : Spring

I do not know what it is that moves me so deeply in the old cities of Southern England, in Canterbury, Rochester, Chichester, most of all, perhaps, in Winchester, unless it be t...

When a man, alone or in a company, entered Canterbury at last by the long road from London, in the thirteenth, fourteenth or fifteenth century, he came into a city as famous as...

Ashford as we see it to-day, a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants, is altogether a modern place and really in the worst sense, for it owes its importance and its ugliness to...

All day I went through the Forest, sometimes by green rides, enchanted still, such as those down which Lancelot rode with Guinevere, talking of love, sometimes over heaths wild...

It was my good fortune, while I was in Chichester, to be tempted to explore the peninsula of Selsey, which most authorities declare to have no beauty and little interest for the...

From my little quiet retreat at Edburton, I set out one May morning to follow the road under the Downs, through Steyning for Arundel and Chichester, because it is one of the fai...

When I determined to set out once more to traverse and to possess England of my heart, it was part of my desire first of all to follow, as far as might be, in the footsteps of C...

The entry into Dartford completes the first and, it must be confessed, the dullest portion of the Pilgrims' Road to Canterbury. Here at Dartford the pilgrims slept, here to-day...

It was upon as fair a spring morning as ever was in England, that I set out from Canterbury through the West Gate, and climbing up the shoulder of Harbledown, some little way pa...

Out of the vagueness and loneliness of the Marsh, with its strange level light and tingling silence, I climbed one spring evening at sunset into the ancient town of Rye, and at...

While I was in Southampton, I made up my mind to visit a place which I had all my life desired to see, but which I had never yet set eyes upon, I mean Beaulieu Abbey in the New...

I do not know of a more beautiful town than Lewes in all the wide south country; it is beautiful not only in itself but in its situation, set there upon an isolated hill over th...

I set out from Winchester early one June morning by Jewry Street, as it were out of the old North Gate to follow, perhaps, the oldest road in old England towards Alton, intendin...

The old road leaves Rochester to pass through Chatham, and is by no means delightful until it has left what Camden called "the best appointed arsenal the world ever saw." Chatha...

The mere plan of Chichester proclaims its Roman origin. It is a little walled city lying out upon the sea plain of Sussex, cruciform by reason of its streets, North Street, Sout...

It is not often on one's way, even in England of my heart, that one can come upon a place, a lonely hill-side or a city, and say: this is a spot upon which the history of the wo...

Perhaps after all the most fundamental truth about Lewes is that she is the capital of the South Downs, and the South Downs are the glory of the South Country; from the noble an...

In Rochester, serene and yet active, the very ancient seat of a bishopric, we have something essentially Roman, the fortress on the Watling Street guarding the passage of the Me...

There can be no one who has stood upon one of the great heights of the Downs north and south, upon Ditchling Beacon, Chanctonbury or Leith Hill, who, looking across the Weald, h...

When I left Porchester I went on into Fareham to sleep, and next morning set out by train, for it was raining, to go to Clausentum. Before I left the railway, however, the weath...

From Faversham at least to the environs of Canterbury, the Pilgrim's Road seems to be unmistakable, for the Watling Street runs all the way straight as a ruled line. Yet so few...

One comes down the hill into Rochester, through Strood, on this side the Medway, to find little remaining of interest in a place that has now become scarcely more than a suburb...